GyG1345
12-17-02, 05:39 AM
washingtonpost.com
Enlistee Finds Parallels to Past
Grandfather's Service Heartens and Haunts Volunteer Warrior
By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 17, 2002; Page A01
Another in a series of occasional articles.
Kyle Conley saw only glimmers of his grandfather. There was a medal he noticed when he was 11 or 12 -- a Purple Heart. There was a black-and-white photo of a handsome man in uniform. There were yellowed letters in an attic box.
These were pieces of family history that he did not dwell on as a boy in the Virginia suburbs. Once, his grandmother eyed him fondly and said: "You remind me most of Jack." He wondered a little.
The notion of his grandfather returned in a soft flash of memory when Conley was 32 and lying in a bunk at Parris Island, S.C. He was covered with a green wool blanket, in a darkened barracks, at a military boot camp -- a wartime enlistee himself.
He had by then joined the Marine Corps, becoming one of the most unlikely recruits in his boot-camp class, where much inspiration had come from Sept. 11, 2001. It was not just age that separated Conley from the other men. Now he was part of a two-career marriage, with a pregnant wife, a young daughter, a mortgage payment and an upscale job in Washington.
"Why are you here?" he was quizzed by more than one drill instructor.
There were many answers to that question, but they all started with that singular September morning when thousands were killed in Washington and New York, and Americans lost an innocence, a sense of invulnerability. Had that day not happened, Conley would have gone on as a senior associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers and finished the thesis for his second master's degree without giving a thought to the military.
Yet now that he had signed up -- now that he found himself in a boot camp where orders were shouted and spit, and obedience was expected on command -- Conley found himself, in the few quiet moments that he had, thinking back across the years. Not to his own childhood but to the America of 1944. To his grandfather's war.
Happiness, Then Heartache
In the early 1940s, Jack Farley had been blessed by good turns.
Farley had grown up in a well-to-do family in Rochester, N.Y., and followed his father and older brother to Yale University. When he graduated from Yale in 1939, he went on to Harvard for his MBA.
In spring 1941, with two Ivy League degrees, he landed in Detroit as an executive trainee for Ford Motor Co. Not long afterward, on a blind date, he met the love of his life, Marjorie Kaufmann, a sorority girl from the University of Michigan.
She was impressed, she recalls, by his good looks, his warm humor, his waltzing on the dance floor. Fine-featured and boyish-looking, Jack swam and skied and rode horses. He aspired to rise in the business world. It was 1941, and they were soon engaged, so right did it all seem.
Then came Dec. 7.
They were on the mezzanine of the luxurious Statler Hotel in Detroit, where they planned to have dinner, when they heard a loudspeaker announcement: "The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor." Jack and Marjorie looked at each other, stunned, then teary-eyed. They drove to Marjorie's parents' home, where the four sat beside a radio in silent shock.
It was not long before men all over the United States were lined up at recruiting offices, volunteering for the war that the United States declared Dec. 8, 1941.
Jack at first thought he could do his part at Ford, where he was assigned to a war-industry division that produced Pratt & Whitney airplane engines. He and Marjorie married early in 1942, and later that year they had their first baby. But the infant boy died after 2 1/2 days, and their expectations dissolved in heartache.
By then, many of the couple's friends were fighting overseas. The question of whether Jack should go too was never far from his mind, his wife said. One day Jack came home with a magazine story about John F. Kennedy's service in the war.
"I have to go," he told his young wife. "My friends are dying. Anybody can do what I do at the plant. Do you understand?"
His wife said she did, but by now she was pregnant again. The day of their daughter Stephanie's birth in 1943 -- ordinary at the time -- is now indelible: Sept. 11.
History Takes Hold
Twenty-six years later, Kyle Conley was born outside Munich, the son of Jack Farley's Sept. 11 baby.
The family did not stay overseas long after Kyle arrived. His father, then an Army captain working in health administration, completed his three-year tour of duty and the family relocated in 1970 to the Washington suburbs.
Kyle grew up admiring his father's old uniforms and concocting battles with green plastic Army men, but otherwise gave the military little thought. His boyhood loves were soccer and football, which he played with his friends almost daily, and the Dallas Cowboys, which he cheered with fervor.
The middle child in a trio of brothers, Conley was always independent-minded and bright, the son of two Georgetown graduates who valued education. His father went on to earn a PhD, and his mother, a nurse, earned a law degree. For Kyle, academics always came easily. One of his strongest subjects was history.
As a junior, he won his high school's history award. He had a mind for dates, for events that compelled change.
At 17 he found himself as close to history's unfolding as he had ever been. He was in Brussels, accompanying his father, Dean -- out of the military and working as a health management consultant -- on a trip to a NATO conference.
Once the NATO meetings ended, father and son decided to explore their European surroundings. They traveled to the hospital near Munich where Kyle had been born, and to Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp, which Kyle had asked to visit.
Their first stop, however, had been Margraten, in the Netherlands near the German border.
There, on a cool gray afternoon, Kyle stood in an expanse of stark white crosses. Talkative by nature, he was now quiet, transported to another time, absorbing the sheer enormity of war's toll. He kept his hands in the pockets of his sweat shirt.
This was hallowed ground for allied soldiers. These were men who fought beside his grandfather.
'My Thoughts Are With You'
Jack Farley signed up at a recruiter's office in Detroit in 1943. He had a deferment because of his war-industry employment. But by now his older brother was in the Army. His best friends had joined the Navy as officers.
He wanted to do his part.
It did not go exactly as he expected. The Navy was glad to take him as an officer -- until doctors discovered he was colorblind. He was disqualified, his wife said, and ultimately was processed through the Army, which did not want him as an officer.
The Army made Farley a private.
He went off to boot camp for 17 weeks at Fort Blanding, Fla., and his 21-year-old wife and infant daughter moved nearby, finding a room in a converted dormitory at the University of Florida so the family could savor whatever time was possible: a day, a night, a meal, an hour.
That spring, there was a life-threatening case of measles that delayed Jack's departure, and then the Army's request that he have new glasses. But the couple was always aware that Jack was headed into combat and that every day Western Union wires reported the nation's dead.
Finally Jack kissed his wife and held her tightly in Grand Central Station in New York, in a farewell shared by hundreds of other GIs and their wives and girlfriends.
"Just a note to let you share the overwhelming joy of the first letter from Jack. He is somewhere.........
Continued...
http://www.network54.com/Forum/message?forumid=135069&messageid=1040125000
Enlistee Finds Parallels to Past
Grandfather's Service Heartens and Haunts Volunteer Warrior
By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 17, 2002; Page A01
Another in a series of occasional articles.
Kyle Conley saw only glimmers of his grandfather. There was a medal he noticed when he was 11 or 12 -- a Purple Heart. There was a black-and-white photo of a handsome man in uniform. There were yellowed letters in an attic box.
These were pieces of family history that he did not dwell on as a boy in the Virginia suburbs. Once, his grandmother eyed him fondly and said: "You remind me most of Jack." He wondered a little.
The notion of his grandfather returned in a soft flash of memory when Conley was 32 and lying in a bunk at Parris Island, S.C. He was covered with a green wool blanket, in a darkened barracks, at a military boot camp -- a wartime enlistee himself.
He had by then joined the Marine Corps, becoming one of the most unlikely recruits in his boot-camp class, where much inspiration had come from Sept. 11, 2001. It was not just age that separated Conley from the other men. Now he was part of a two-career marriage, with a pregnant wife, a young daughter, a mortgage payment and an upscale job in Washington.
"Why are you here?" he was quizzed by more than one drill instructor.
There were many answers to that question, but they all started with that singular September morning when thousands were killed in Washington and New York, and Americans lost an innocence, a sense of invulnerability. Had that day not happened, Conley would have gone on as a senior associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers and finished the thesis for his second master's degree without giving a thought to the military.
Yet now that he had signed up -- now that he found himself in a boot camp where orders were shouted and spit, and obedience was expected on command -- Conley found himself, in the few quiet moments that he had, thinking back across the years. Not to his own childhood but to the America of 1944. To his grandfather's war.
Happiness, Then Heartache
In the early 1940s, Jack Farley had been blessed by good turns.
Farley had grown up in a well-to-do family in Rochester, N.Y., and followed his father and older brother to Yale University. When he graduated from Yale in 1939, he went on to Harvard for his MBA.
In spring 1941, with two Ivy League degrees, he landed in Detroit as an executive trainee for Ford Motor Co. Not long afterward, on a blind date, he met the love of his life, Marjorie Kaufmann, a sorority girl from the University of Michigan.
She was impressed, she recalls, by his good looks, his warm humor, his waltzing on the dance floor. Fine-featured and boyish-looking, Jack swam and skied and rode horses. He aspired to rise in the business world. It was 1941, and they were soon engaged, so right did it all seem.
Then came Dec. 7.
They were on the mezzanine of the luxurious Statler Hotel in Detroit, where they planned to have dinner, when they heard a loudspeaker announcement: "The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor." Jack and Marjorie looked at each other, stunned, then teary-eyed. They drove to Marjorie's parents' home, where the four sat beside a radio in silent shock.
It was not long before men all over the United States were lined up at recruiting offices, volunteering for the war that the United States declared Dec. 8, 1941.
Jack at first thought he could do his part at Ford, where he was assigned to a war-industry division that produced Pratt & Whitney airplane engines. He and Marjorie married early in 1942, and later that year they had their first baby. But the infant boy died after 2 1/2 days, and their expectations dissolved in heartache.
By then, many of the couple's friends were fighting overseas. The question of whether Jack should go too was never far from his mind, his wife said. One day Jack came home with a magazine story about John F. Kennedy's service in the war.
"I have to go," he told his young wife. "My friends are dying. Anybody can do what I do at the plant. Do you understand?"
His wife said she did, but by now she was pregnant again. The day of their daughter Stephanie's birth in 1943 -- ordinary at the time -- is now indelible: Sept. 11.
History Takes Hold
Twenty-six years later, Kyle Conley was born outside Munich, the son of Jack Farley's Sept. 11 baby.
The family did not stay overseas long after Kyle arrived. His father, then an Army captain working in health administration, completed his three-year tour of duty and the family relocated in 1970 to the Washington suburbs.
Kyle grew up admiring his father's old uniforms and concocting battles with green plastic Army men, but otherwise gave the military little thought. His boyhood loves were soccer and football, which he played with his friends almost daily, and the Dallas Cowboys, which he cheered with fervor.
The middle child in a trio of brothers, Conley was always independent-minded and bright, the son of two Georgetown graduates who valued education. His father went on to earn a PhD, and his mother, a nurse, earned a law degree. For Kyle, academics always came easily. One of his strongest subjects was history.
As a junior, he won his high school's history award. He had a mind for dates, for events that compelled change.
At 17 he found himself as close to history's unfolding as he had ever been. He was in Brussels, accompanying his father, Dean -- out of the military and working as a health management consultant -- on a trip to a NATO conference.
Once the NATO meetings ended, father and son decided to explore their European surroundings. They traveled to the hospital near Munich where Kyle had been born, and to Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp, which Kyle had asked to visit.
Their first stop, however, had been Margraten, in the Netherlands near the German border.
There, on a cool gray afternoon, Kyle stood in an expanse of stark white crosses. Talkative by nature, he was now quiet, transported to another time, absorbing the sheer enormity of war's toll. He kept his hands in the pockets of his sweat shirt.
This was hallowed ground for allied soldiers. These were men who fought beside his grandfather.
'My Thoughts Are With You'
Jack Farley signed up at a recruiter's office in Detroit in 1943. He had a deferment because of his war-industry employment. But by now his older brother was in the Army. His best friends had joined the Navy as officers.
He wanted to do his part.
It did not go exactly as he expected. The Navy was glad to take him as an officer -- until doctors discovered he was colorblind. He was disqualified, his wife said, and ultimately was processed through the Army, which did not want him as an officer.
The Army made Farley a private.
He went off to boot camp for 17 weeks at Fort Blanding, Fla., and his 21-year-old wife and infant daughter moved nearby, finding a room in a converted dormitory at the University of Florida so the family could savor whatever time was possible: a day, a night, a meal, an hour.
That spring, there was a life-threatening case of measles that delayed Jack's departure, and then the Army's request that he have new glasses. But the couple was always aware that Jack was headed into combat and that every day Western Union wires reported the nation's dead.
Finally Jack kissed his wife and held her tightly in Grand Central Station in New York, in a farewell shared by hundreds of other GIs and their wives and girlfriends.
"Just a note to let you share the overwhelming joy of the first letter from Jack. He is somewhere.........
Continued...
http://www.network54.com/Forum/message?forumid=135069&messageid=1040125000